Some Of My Favorite Things

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

ObamaCare Through the Ages

U.S. military authorities prepare to hang Dr. Klaus Karl Schilling, 74, at Landsberg, Germany, on May 28, 1946. In a Dachau war crimes trial he was convicted of using 1,200 concentration camp prisoners for malaria experimentation. Thirty died directly from the inoculations and 300 to 400 died later from complications of the disease. His experiments, all with unwilling subjects, began in 1942.

In 1932, American doctors allow 399 poor black sharecroppers to die of untreated syphilis because they wanted to see how the disease would progress. The impoverished men had no idea they were being used as human guinea pigs. The study was conducted under numerous US Public Health Supervisors. Everyone involved, both those who directed the studies, who actively prevented the sharecroppers from receiving treatment and who published their findings in respected medical journals, died tranquilly in their beds. The study ended in 1972.

Whoever wrote that article doesn't know much about syphilis or Tuskegee.

No one has ever said the doctors deliberately infected poor black farmers with syphilis in Tuskegee (although the US Public Health Service did EXACTLY that in Guatamala). But the doctors didn't contact trace, they didn't treat and they went out of their way to visit all local clinics in the area and warn THOSE clinics not to treat the black men in the study.

Now, if treatment was so freaking useless, why would the doctors take that last step? Kind of shoots holes in the revisionist history you link to.

When Tuskegee was started in 1932, most states in the Union had already implemented mandatory contact tracing. By law, the patient and all sexual contacts had to be told they had syphilis or were in contact with someone who had it, and were required to refrain from sex. Indeed, during WW I, syphilitic women were put in jail to make sure they didn't have sex, in much the same way that TB patients were put in jail for spitting on the sidewalk, and for the same reason: to halt the spread of a really nasty disease.

By 1947, penicillin was known to be an almost unfailing cure for syphilis, but despite this, the Tuskegee doctors didn't treat the poor black men in the study and prevented them from getting treatment at any other location. THAT is the problem with Tuskegee.

As for the other implied "credible counter-rational", it is well-known that many of the experiments run in the death camps produced very useful data. The data on hypothermia, for instance, is still used. One of the quiet little post-war secrets is that most of the Nazi doctors were never jailed. They kept the data generated in the camps and continued to publish analyses using that in medical journals for decades after the war was over. It helped them burnish their reputation as some of the finest doctors Germany had ever produced, in large part because the camps WERE run by some of the best doctors in Germany. See Robert Lifton's The Nazi Doctors

So, does that make the death camps alright then? Obviously not.

The Democrats had created the KKK by 1870 and begun revoking Republican civil rights legislation by the 1880s. They passed Jim Crow, then Democrat President Woodrow Wilson introduced segregation into the government and the military. By 1937, under the Democrat FDR, the FHA was actively enforcing segregation in housing via redlining.

Tuskegee was absolutely a racist science experiment. If it were otherwise, if it was as your article suggests, they would have run the experiment on Boston Brahmins. Can you imagine such a thing? Yeah, neither can I.